Software applications that manage media collections have become widely adopted as the amount of digital media, including images, has grown. State-of-the-art programs utilize metadata, or information about the media items managed, to help categorizing media collection. Prior art has concentrated on solutions that typically work on personal computers with associated display and other user interface capabilities. Development of mobile communication and computing technology, however, has made it possible to have similar media collections also in mobile personal communication devices with more constrained user interface capabilities.
There are software applications, for example Adobe Album®, that are developed for managing media collections that are stored in personal computers. One example of the prior art techniques is presented in international publication WO 02/057959A2 “Digital media management apparatus and methods” by Adobe Systems. The publication presents a method and an apparatus for managing, finding and displaying objects, such as digital images. The objects are associated with descriptive textual and numeric data (“metadata”) and stored in a relational database from which they can be selected, sorted and found. These objects can be searched for and displayed according to the degree to which their metadata matches the search criteria. Objects that are in the different match groups can be differentiated from one another in the display area by visual cues, such as being displayed in front of different background colors or patterns.
One example of a method for managing media objects is presented in publication US2003/0009469A1 “Managing media objects in a database” by Microsoft Corporation. The publication presents a method and an apparatus for organizing media objects in a database using contextual information for a media object and known media objects, categories, indexes and searches, to arrive at an inference for cataloging the media object in the database. The method and the apparatus are provided for clustering media objects by forming groups of unlabeled data and applying a distance metric to said group. Media objects are automatically organized into various collections by clustering images that are taken near each other in time. A user interface may include one image per collection, where the image is shown to the user. If the user is searching for an image, the user views the images respectively representing collections of images and selects a collection that appears to relate to the desired image. Once a collection is selected, the images corresponding to the collection are shown to the user.
It can be seen that the above-described methods suit personal computers well, but have usability and operational problems if transferred into mobile environment. The existing methods are not that feasible in all mobile terminal categories due to being dependent on user's capability to view a display of considerable size and to select media items, categories etc. by point-and-click methods, such as a mouse. However, it would be highly preferable for the end-user to have corresponding functionality in a personal mobile terminal, thus providing users with access to their media collections even when the personal computers are not accessible.
In mobile terminals the media query problems are usually solved by folder-based approach in local storage (memory card or similar), but this has all the same limitations as the folder-based approach in the desktop environment. In the prior art methods the media query problem in a mobile terminal is solved by an access to a remote media collection via a mobile net connection, wherein the user interface logic (use of categories, keywords, etc.) is handled in the server-side. This approach has the benefit of being potentially able to incorporate very advanced metadata-assisted queries, providing the appropriate logic has been implemented in the server-side. However, this approach is not plausible if the network connection is not available for some reason.
For the above-mentioned reasons it is necessary to develop a new method for managing large amounts of media items. The method should be reasonably easy to use even in small displays and it should provide practical access only to limited selection mechanisms. The current invention is a client-side approach and the implementation can be carried out in the mobile device.